An airstrike has killed nearly 40 pro-regime foreign fighters in eastern Syria, with a US-led coalition denying accusations from Damascus that it was behind the attack.
The airstrike just before midnight hit Al-Hari, a town controlled by regional militias fighting in the seven-year war on the side of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor of the conflict, said it was one of the deadliest air raids on government loyalists in the past few months.
“Thirty-eight non-Syrian fighters from regime loyalist militias were killed in the night-time raid on Al-Hari, on the Syrian-Iraqi border,” observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.
He could not give any further details on their nationalities, but there are Iraqi, Iranian, Lebanese and Afghan fighters stationed in the area.
Syrian state media reported the attack overnight, citing a military source and accusing the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State (IS) group of carrying it out.
It said several people were killed and wounded, but did not give a specific number or their nationalities.
The coalition’s press office said it had heard reports that an airstrike in the area had killed and wounded members of a pro-regime Iraqi militia, but denied it was responsible.
“There have been no strikes by US or coalition forces in that area,” it told reporters by e-mail.
Last month, a dozen pro-regime fighters were killed in an airstrike on Syrian government positions that the observatory and state media blamed on the coalition.
The US Department of Defense denied responsibility.
In February, US-led coalition airstrikes killed at least 100 pro-regime fighters in Deir Ezzor Province, including Russians.
“The strike on Al-Hari produced the highest death toll for regime forces since the February incident,” Rahman said.
More than 350,000 people have been killed since Syria’s conflict erupted in 2011 with protests against al-Assad’s rule.
The strike on Al-Hari came a day after the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces announced it had ousted Islamic State militants from Dashisha, a village to the north in Syria’s Hasakeh Province.
The village had been one of the last IS-controlled areas on a corridor linking Syria with Iraq.
“For the first time in four years, Dashisha, a notorious transit town for weapons, fighters and suicide bombers between Iraq and Syria, is no longer controlled by ISIS terrorists,” Brett McGurk, the US president’s special envoy for the war against the IS, said yesterday, using another acronym for the group.
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